Integrated planning for urban regeneration: The Dynamic Planning approach

The UK Government recognised the importance of a holistic outlook and integrated planning for urban regeneration as far back as the 1980s, but its progress has been slow. The call for ‘spatial’ and ‘integrated’ planning has since then been extended to all levels of planning, but is still not very well practised. In a previous paper (Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp.180–184, 2009) the author suggests several reasons for this failure and, among them, the lack of a coherent concept of ‘integrated planning’ and the lack of skills in ‘how to do it’. This paper proposes a concept and, derived from it, a practical method for integrated planning under the title of Dynamic Planning for Urban Regeneration. It starts with seeking to understand — in discussion with ‘active’ and ‘recipient’ stakeholders — how their interactions brought about the process of change that led to the decline of an area. This analysis is then taken forward to anticipate the chain of events likely to result from any intervention and their impacts on different groups of recipient stakeholders. A third paper will suggest a method for integrated evaluation of regeneration strategies, which is incorporated with this method of planning.